The traditional method of transcribing music is for the composer to play a few notes, stop and write them down, play a few more notes, stop and write those down, and so on for the rest of the piece. This can be very disruptive of the composing process and quite time consuming.
Attempts have been made in recent years to alleviate these problems through the use of electronics, both with and without the aid of a computer. In U.S. Pat. No. 4,104,949 (Clark), a keyboard was electronically connected to a typewriter which had been modified to print musical notation. Each time a key on the keyboard was struck, the corresponding key on the typewriter would strike the paper. In U.S. Pat. No. 3,926,088 (Davis, et al.), a special keyboard having electrical switches associated with each key was connected to a data processing system. The data processing system would analyze each note being played on the keyboard to determine its duration, select the proper note or notes to represent it, and print the results out on a conventional music scale.
These techniques have the extreme disadvantage that they require the use of a keyboard, and, in particular, a specially made keyboard connected to the system so that a standard piano would not be useable. While many musicians are familiar with the use of a piano, organ or other keyboard instrument, many others are not. To them, the Clark and Davis inventions are of little value.
These non-keyboard playing musicians also cannot easily modify the inventions disclosed by Clark and Davis. A conventional, non-electronic, musical instrument generates several different pitches, or harmonics, each time a note is played. These different pitches played together sound harmonious to the human ear, but if only a microphone, amplifier and pitch detector were substituted for the keyboards in the Clark or Davis inventions, the signals to be transcribed would include all of the different harmonics being played at any given time, not just the note intended to be played.
In the Clark and Davis inventions, the use of specially connected keyboards allowed the direct detection of what note was intended to be played. The note intended was clearly the note corresponding to the key being depressed. With a non-keyboard instrument, it may not be this simple. The sound generated by the instrument may fluctuate around the actual pitch intended to be played. Such fluctuations would normally be referred to as transients. These transients might be the result of the instrument being slightly out of tune, or due to minor movements in the fingers of the musician.
In addition, with a non-keyboard instrument, various pitches of very short duration, also called transients, will often sound when the transition is being made from one note to another, with or without the musician intending them to. This type of transient would not generally be found when using a keyboard instrument. Both types of transients are typically far too short in duration to be perceptible to the human ear, but they are quite long enough to be detectable by electronic systems.
A system designed to use exclusively keyboard instruments would normally not have allowed for the potential errors introduced by transients. While transients might be found in the sounds being produced, they would not occur on the keyboards themselves. Since Clark and Davis "read" the notes being played directly from the keyboard, no allowance for transients was necessary.
It is the purpose of the present invention to provide a music transcription device which does not require the use of a keyboard and to which the musical instrument being played need not be electronically connected. Music may then be directly transcribed when it is played on an instrument in the conventional manner.